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User: marcosdumay

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Comments · 6,436

  1. Re:Like to see this replicated on German Doctor Cures an HIV Patient With a Bone Marrow Transplant · · Score: 1

    That is the decision that would lead to the extinction of humanity. Nobody is immune to all disieases.

    A more logical decision would be to apply such treatment massively on everybody that gets infected, and extinguish the virus.

  2. That is to teach people on Old Malware Tricks Still Defeat Most AV Scanners · · Score: 1

    Windows makes a bad media player. Linux is way better for handling multimedia files (if your country doesn't make it illegal, of course).

  3. Re:Fun with Prompts on (Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks? · · Score: 1

    That is great, I use 'if command; then echo true; else echo false' all the time.

    But, unfortunely, this thread is about emacs.

  4. c-x roll on (Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks? · · Score: 1

    c-x stop
    c-x bark

  5. Re:Well duh... on Researchers Crack WPA Wi-Fi Encryption · · Score: 1

    SSL and SSH were tested for enough time for using them over wireless. Of course, you'll have to assure that the endpoints aren't compromissed, but that is always a problem, not only for wireless.

  6. No need on (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks? · · Score: 1

    You can code arithmetic operations with xarg + grep. You just need conveniently named files (on your data tape).

    Yeah, probably the GP is right.

  7. Re:grep and awk on (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks? · · Score: 1

    "I presume the modern unix user prefers perl."

    Ok, that is funny. No, newbies seem to prefer python for some reason that I can not understand. But if modern you are talking about people of my age (meet linux by 97), so I like grep quite well, but prefer sed to awk.

  8. Re:Show attached block devices on (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks? · · Score: 1

    Is that different from 'grep foo *'?

  9. I like that more on (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks? · · Score: 1

    To clean up some C compilation:
    rm * .o

  10. Re:Microsoft needs to take support seriously. on Microsoft Begs Hardware Makers To Take Support Seriously · · Score: 1

    There is a software on Windows, called Explorer, that is the one you interface with. It is not exactly a shell, since it desn't fork all your processes, it just seems to manage the interface.

    Explorer uses the same rendering engine as Internet Explorer. Microsoft made it so that they could argue in court that the rendering engine of Internet Explorer was an essential part of the OS. Now, 10 years aready passed, Netscape is no more, and the GP is saying that there is no reason to use the IE problematic rendering engine to present the entire user interface anymore.

  11. Re:Those kids these days! on Microsoft Discontinues Windows 3.x · · Score: 1

    Well, I don't know about any PRINT shortcuts, but there is a SysReq one that also sends the reboot signal to the BIOS. My post was a joke, I don't know why it was moddeded insightful (damn karma system). Instant reboot is too dangerous a thing to be easy to access on a modern OS, and after everybody was trained to press CTRL + ALT + DEL because of unreliable DOS software, all those OSes did the right thing by disabling it.

  12. Re:Two words on Barack Obama Wins US Presidency · · Score: 1

    Not being from the US, I guess I can answer that. We wan't the best for ourselfs, that is, we don't want to lose a very important commercial partner just because it chooses to bankrupt itself, nor we want you to send your people to die and kill out of your borders.

    I'd think those are also on your interest, but sadly, history makes that a risky bet.

  13. Re:Another helpful hint on EA Recommends Hilarious Work-Around For RA3 CD-Key · · Score: 1

    "in practice it will always be at the very end"

    Sorry, but that may or may not be true. The original poster however made only completely true assertions.

  14. Re:Proper Linking Please on Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Bloggers are just getting in line with professional journalists. When was the last time you saw a reference on a paper news? Or even on a web news?

  15. Re:Damn it! on Microsoft Discontinues Windows 3.x · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but your software must know about it, otherwise it will still be restricted to 640k.

  16. Re:Those kids these days! on Microsoft Discontinues Windows 3.x · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And the three-finger salute realy restarted the machine by that time. No soft restart (learn that Linux!), no set of options (learn that XP!), and was never ignored (learn that crashing Vista!), just a restart, managed by the BIOS, the way IBM meant it to be!

    Now, all you kids get out of my lawn!

  17. Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole on Windows 7 To Be 256-Core Aware · · Score: 1

    What do you think people will need to host a low trafic ASP.NET site when Windows 7 gets out?

    A cluster of 256-core machines running some not bloated OS will probably be quite less common.

  18. Re:How much info can you hide in a scientific pape on Researchers Calculate Capacity of a Steganographic Channel · · Score: 1

    "So, does anyone know how much data can be stuffed, undetectably, into a 700MB AVI file?"

    No idea, but it is probably a lot less than you can stuff undetectably on a 700MB WAV file ;)

    You can hide as much data as there is noise on your file (granted it is compressed and cryptographed), so when you record that WAV file, be sure to do that in a noisy anvironment. By the way, I didn't RTFA, to see what those people really discovered (obviously, not what the sumary say they did), I'm here to see if it is worth it.

  19. Re:Stop the presses!!! on New Type of Particle May Have Been Found · · Score: 1

    Yeah, that does explain it.

    Thanks.

  20. Stop the presses!!! on New Type of Particle May Have Been Found · · Score: 1

    "(1cm/20ps)=~1.66c"

    Somebody has just discovered a tachion! The supremacy of causality falls!!!

    And, yes, the parent's calculation is right. I didn't RTFA, so I don't know where is the error.

  21. Re:Vote on Discuss the US Presidential Election & Education · · Score: 1

    It looks like you want a weaker executive branch then.

  22. Re:Voter registration on How We Used To Vote · · Score: 1

    Well, not american, but we have voter registration at Brazil. Here, it has two major reasons why it makes sense, the first is that it is the only registration that reliably tracks on what city a person lives, second, it is the most relaible register of who are the brazilian citizens, since it is checked every 2 years at the municipal, state and national levels. Being the most reliable registration, it is used to verify every other kind of registration, including the ones used for taxes.

    The downside is that there an entire new level of boureocracy, but most of it is necessary (keeping track of residence), the unecessary parts requiring quite less interation (registering is done only once, for example).

  23. Re:Bullshit on Bullshit! on 1/3 of Amphibians Dying Out · · Score: 1

    Thinking hard about it, it looks like yes, they have.

    Also, it makes sure that no valid message will ever be heard by the masses.

  24. Ok, I'll bite on 1/3 of Amphibians Dying Out · · Score: 5, Informative

    "How do we know global warming is happening?"

    We have such special machines named pyromether and thermometer. The lattrer one we use at surface, to measure local temperature and guess what, most of them are averaging to highter temperatures every year. But the real juice we get from the first one, we put them on satelites and measure the temperature averaged on a big area, and guess what, the global average temperature is going up too.

    "How do we know it's not just a natural occurrence?"

    We can't be completely sure. But we can be some 80% to 99% sure that the bigest part of it is man-made. We know, from looking at other planets, from physics and chemistry, and from observing correlations (note that the two fist imply causation) that dumping CO2 at the atmosphere causes global warming. We are also able to make calculations, see how much CO2 we put at the atmosphere, and comare it with how much CO2 goes there naturaly. It is not hard to go from there to a conclusion, since our output is almost an order of magnitude highter.

    See, no circular logic. Now, you won't listen anyway, so continue beliving what you want, should I advice you to put all your economies at realstate too? It can only go up.

  25. Re:Spin Lock again? on Windows 7 To Be 256-Core Aware · · Score: 1

    I have never sent any code to the Linux dev team, but I've already messed with it.

    The kernel has some global data, and that data must be protected by corruption by concurrent access. Every time your program makes a system call, there is a new thread operating at kernel space, with access to all that shared data, sometimes it will access it, other times it won't. Ok, now, the classical way of protecting shared memory from corruption caused by concurrent access is to use locks to completely avoid concurrency at those sections, that way, every piece of code that wants to access a piece of data needs to check if there is nobody else accessing it, and if there is, wait untill it finishes. (Ok, you probably already know all that.)

    Now, the 2.4 series has a few locks for very commonly used data and one lock for everything else. That is simple to implement, but every thread that needs access to some uncommon data has to queue with every other thread that access uncommon data, even if both pieces of data aren't related at all. The 2.6 series created one lock for each group of related data, so threads only need to queue with the ones that access related data.

    Now, on practice, not every system call have a lock somewhere, but some important ones do have, including the sceduler. So, system calls are not serialized by the 2.4 series, but making the scheduler wait brings a very harsh penalty on troughput and, more noticeably, responsiveness.